No more tarp

Today, I decided to spend the day finishing off several fix ups around the house.

One of them was to remove the tarp off the chimney. This involved dragging the ladder out of the basement so I could take the tarp off. I took the camera up with me so I could document what the chimeny looked like, just in case I found something that needed a touch up.

But everything looks pretty good!

This is a photo from the other side of the chimney.

Here you can see the ladder sitting by the front step.

This also shows another thing that I did - that was fix the shutoff valve so I could turn on the hose. This required the following steps:

• move about 2 dozen boxes so I could access the main water shut off valve by the water meter
• shut off the water
• dismantle the shut off valve
• reassemble the valve
• turn on the water and test for leaks

So, it all went well except for the (you guessed it) disassemble the valve. I took off the handle, but then I couldn't budge the large nut that held on the body of the valve. Then I realized that there was a little nut over the valve stem, which is where the water was leaking from, so I took the nut off and went to Home Depot to see if I could get an O-ring or gasket or something. They didn't have anything that would fit because of the age of the valve (52 years old), however one guy at Home Depot suggested rolling some teflon tape and wrap that around the valve stem. So I did that and it worked well to stop the leak.